TDM Fresnel Mod

[stgatilov]

And yes, tweaking shaders is fast and easy, and has immediate effect, thus there are many people who do that. I believe we also had some external guy recently who did the same in "Want to Help" section.

Maybe we should just add these shader tweaks into addon managers and allow people switch between them as they like? Just like people can install a program (don't remember its name) and add postprocessing like FXAA to any game.

[peter_spy]

I think you mean Reshade. I used it a couple of times, it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve

Also, maybe this will help to illustrate the problem better:

As you can see with image 2 & 4, the geometric complexity, whether with actual polygons or faked via smooth edges on normalmap, does matter. And I bet when most users think 'fresnel', they mean the last example.

Most TDM geometry is brushes and models textured with simple tiling materials. They won't look like the last example, until they have enough polygons.

[STiFU]

15 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

Also, maybe this will help to illustrate the problem better:

As you can see with image 2 & 4, the geometric complexity, whether with actual polygons or faked via smooth edges on normalmap, does matter. And I bet when most users think 'fresnel', they mean the last example.

Most TDM geometry is brushes and models textured with simple tiling materials. They won't look like the last example, until they have enough polygons.

Hm, I am not sure I follow. Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity.

 

15 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

I think you mean Reshade. I used it a couple of times, it has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve

Reshade is awesome. I use it all the time to improve the visuals of old classics. The Post-Lightmaps-Era games just look so much better with some SSAO...

[peter_spy]

1 hour ago, STiFU said:

Shouldn't the behaviour of the Rim shader be independet of actual geometric complexity and normal map based complexity? If the answer is yes, then brushes should also look fine because the applied material provides geometric complexity.

IIUC, fresnel uses view direction and surface normal vectors. This is a comparison between simple brush cube and one with chamfered edges on geometry, both using the same tiling material:

Brush cube is on the right; in the background you see a cube with chamfered edges. There is a thin line on the bottom of the brush cube, because it matches the normalmap, the mortar part of the bricks. But as soon as I change texture coordinates of the brush:

While the chamfered cube has enough geometry to work with fresnel shader, even if I change texture coordinates:

So it seems to work as described, it needs either geometry normals or details faked on normalmap. I think fresnel in other pre-pbr engines, like UE3, works the same or similar way.

Edited January 27, 2024 by peter_spy

[7318]

why not go al the way up and give the ambient light a screen space reflection term, so the fresnel affected pixels would reflect what is behind them (at grazing angles) instead of a static term? this means that if what is behind them is way darker then the fresnel won't reflect anything, and if what is behind is is way lighter then the fresenel would take a portion of that reflected light, i guess you could use the specularity term of every texture to derive how much those fresnel effects do gather from the SSR term.

Edited January 28, 2024 by 7318

[nbohr1more]

FYI the 2.12 compliant version is available now that the beta is over:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-212

[lowenz]

Thanks, man!

[nbohr1more]

New Fresnel Mod dropped!

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-213-alpha-unofficial

This is for the 2.13 Developer build that includes "parallax occlusion mapping".

[nbohr1more]

Sorry for the delay.

New fresnel mod for Dev Build dev17171-10894 ( latest ) is now available:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-213-alpha-unofficial

[datiswous]

Why is the file called tdm_base01.1.pk4 (in both last versions) and tdm_base01.4.pk4 (2.12 version)? Why not have proper descriptive file names?

What version am I suposed to use when I use a 2.13 alpha build before "parallax occlusion mapping"?

Edited November 1, 2024 by datiswous

[nbohr1more]

5 minutes ago, datiswous said:

Why is the file called tdm_base01.1.pk4 (in both last versions) and tdm_base01.4.pk4 (2.12 version)? Why not have proper descriptive file names?

What version am I suposed to use when I use a 2.13 alpha build before "parallax occlusion mapping"?

Moddb keeps automatically renaming the file. It should just be an overwrite of the tdm_base01.pk4

I was mainly focusing on the production versions and the "latest" dev build. I can look into keeping older dev versions maintained but that is asking for trouble since many players will accidentally install an older 2.13 fresnel mod on the latest dev build (etc).

[datiswous]

14 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

Moddb keeps automatically renaming the file. It should just be an overwrite of the tdm_base01.pk4

tdm_base01.4.pk4 works fine as filename. I guess using tdm_base01.pk4 as the filename means it could get overwritten in an update?

Edit: In fact I just renamed the file to fresnel_mod.pk4 and it works just fine.

Although I have not see a difference yet..

Edited November 1, 2024 by datiswous

[datiswous]

Can you tell me a mission where the mod has an impact? I don't see a difference yet.

[datiswous]

The following wiki page https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=A_to_Z_Scripting:_Script_addons_for_players

says:

Quote

Package your /script folder into a .zip archive, then change the extension to .pk4. If your addon contains further files that you want to overwrite core asset files with, then your addon .pk4 name should sort alphabetically after tdm_base01.pk4, for example z_arachnophobia.pk4. Otherwise the .pk4 name no longer matters as of TDM 2.12.

You can now upload this to a file sharing website and post a link to the forums. The .pk4 can simply be dropped into the user's main installation folder with no need to unpack.

So I think it means you can just name the file z_fresnel_mod.pk4 and you don't have to rename the core tdm_base01.1.pk4 .

[nbohr1more]

2 hours ago, datiswous said:

Can you tell me a mission where the mod has an impact? I don't see a difference yet.

Caduceus of St Alban

Vengeance for a Thief 3

William Steele 5

Let Sleeping Thieves Lie

( screenshot comparisons in this part of the thread )

 

[wesp5]

Why does this only effect some missions? Do certain assets need to be used?

[MirceaKitsune]

5 hours ago, wesp5 said:

Why does this only effect some missions? Do certain assets need to be used?

From what I understood with my FM, it affects missions that use the recently added cubemap lights. I add those to my maps as it's the closest we have to PBR and it makes reflections more realistic, by simulating both environment lighting as well as reflections on every surface with a specular channel. I didn't yet use the fresnel mod and only now discovered it doesn't seem to work with those out of the box yet.

[nbohr1more]

Some missions have lots of “bounce lights” ( real lights that are very dim but add more surface shading and character to ambient lighting ). When a mapper takes care to make their ambient lighting more varied and interesting, it’s less likely that you will notice subtle fresnel effects. Most authors just plop in the ambient world light and don’t bother with other ambient lighting effects.

And yes, bright cubic ambient lights are currently incompatible. ( I might be able to figure out how to limit the effect past a certain brightness level too. )

[I.C.H.I.]

Something I very much dislike about fresnel in games is that it makes things glow like a velvet cloth while nothing IRL glows like that except the velvet itself. Brick walls should not glow like velvet, marble statues should not glow like velvet, wood should not glow like velvet. Fresnel should make things reflect light for each case differently but instead it makes them emit it into your eyes in a single universal way which makes the image very unrealistic.

[nbohr1more]

The effect is modulated by specular.

Many games hard-code a fresnel amount that doesn't scale with specular ( Mario Galaxy, etc )

[Arcturus]

In reality reflection changes based on an angle. But when reflection is uniform like here, then that suggests heavy scattering of light due to some tiny fibers or dust.

Not all materials necessarily need to be super realistic, it's more important that picture is pretty to look at.

[nbohr1more]

New dev build version up:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-213-alpha-unofficial

Compatible with the latest dev17251-10920

[nbohr1more]

New build up for beta213-02 :

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-213-alpha-unofficial

[nbohr1more]

2.13 version is up:

https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod/addons/fresnel-mod-213-unofficial

[nbohr1more]

Sorry folks, somehow tdm_ai_base01.pk4 was uploaded instead of tdm_base01.pk4. This has been fixed.